Eth0 reports receive drops on both my servers

[ashman70]

I am seeing receive drops on Eth0 interface on both of my UnRaid servers. One is plugged into a small Cisco gigabit switch, the other into a larger 24 port gigabit switch. What might be causing this? Cables are good, ports might be configured to auto negotiate.

[Squid]

How many drops?  Unless it's extreme I wouldn't worry about it.  A multitude of cabling issues could cause the odd drop

[ashman70]

My main server is reporting:806 drops 2473 overruns. My second server is reporting:42216 drops no overruns. I am doing a large data copy to my second server right now.

[bonienl]

It is perfectly alright to see drops occur. These are frames which the system doesn't process further because it isn't destined for the system (think broadcast/multicast) or it contains unsupported/unknown protocols.

 

When you see a lot of drops then check your other systems on the network, usually these are the culprits.

 

Having overruns means your system can't handle the load of the incoming frames and results in communication slowness. If you believe it is too slow then consider another ethernet adapter board (Intel is highly recommended as it can off-load traffic).

 

[Frank1940]

Don't worry about it UNLESS you are having some other problems- video or audio dropout, etc.  Currently, my Media Server (specs below)  is reporting 86,493,495 Receive Drops after being up for almost 29 days.  As far as I can determine these only happen when I am streaming high bit-rate Blu-ray video.  (I suspect that my media players are simply firing hundreds of requests for packets thinking that that this will guarantee that the video stream will not slowdown.) 

 

I did a lot of research on the web into what 'Drops' mean, what causes them and what can be done about them.  The general conclusion was that they are harmless unless you are experiencing some other problem.  Unfortunately, I first uncovered the problem with them in unRAID back in the version 6 beta development when changes where made in the way the OS was being compiled to better support VM's, dockers, etc. as that change presented some problems with RealTek MB NIC combined with the slow AMD sempron processors that are in my setup.  I went to the Intel NIC board which resolved those issues but caused the Drop errors which have not caused any ill effects that I have ever detected.